Bergsonism

The first movement of Bergsonism begins, like a compiler, by bootstrapping itself. It must ask the meta-question: How does one ask the right sorts of questions? This is the task of thought that Deleuze via Bergson challenges us to undertake, the adventure of doing philosophy that begins not with reading the right canon of philosophers and engaging with the right sorts of questions but rather asking what even are the right questions? A better-fitted word for this meta-theoretical plane that is created by asking what it means to ask the right kinds of questions is "intuition", the Bergsonian method, which has three rules and two corollaries:

1. Identify whether problems themselves are true or false. Ask questions that produce problems which are also solved when correctly stated.
   1. There are two sorts of false problems: Problems which are nonexistent because they think in confused and imprecise terms of "more" and "less", and problems that are badly stated because they have badly analyzed composites.
2. Struggle against the human tendency to think in terms of difference in degree and discover real differences in kind.
   1. The real is not just differences in kind but also lines of difference that converge in a single ideal point that produces those lines.
3. State and solve problems in terms of time rather than space.

Deleuze via Bergson locates the singularity that all minor philosophy is varying lines of flight from: How do we think about the sorts of things that exist in the world in an intuitive way? What we want is to avoid succumbing to the all-too-human tendency to compare our perception of the real with whatever recollections we already have of them, or much worse to become subordinated to a canon of theory that we're told is the correct way to think about things. Deleuze's (and Guattari's) entire project is among other things a rebellion against the hegemony of western philosophy that had already formed in the 60s, even in the supposedly radical continental milieu. This originates in the radical assertion Deleuze makes via Bergson that all major (i.e. orthodox, hegemonical, etc.) philosophy has been engaged in a long game of telephone, essentially, thinking in unintuitive terms. Intuition even in a colloquial sense captures how Deleuze's Bergson thinks philosophy ought to be done, because it implies a state of being prior to any kind of mediating signs, prior to language even. For Deleuze's Bergson, in order to ask the right sorts of questions, we need to be able to identify what produces our concept of a being, what differentiates it in kind, rather than thinking in terms of negation, of how it compares or relates to concepts that someone in a canon of philosophers has already written about.

It's crucial to understand that Deleuze's minor philosophy aligns itself with heterodoxical genealogy of philosophers (Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza, etc.) because thinking unintuitively, in terms of negation, of resemblance or proximity to different philosophers' concepts, is the orthodoxical method. This is why academic philosophy has over its entire history become increasingly gatekept, academic, elitist, and most importantly a controlled opposition: the great dead white men of western civilization weigh on the brains of philosophy students. Major philosophy, along with the academic humanities in general, is no longer a living tradition; even if it isn't blatant idolatry of the dead, in its control modality it is a metaphysical imperialism that continually expands outwards assimilating the Other into the discourses that the Same has already decided the rules of. The Bergsonian method of intuition is meant to be an antidote to this.

Deleuze's Bergson denounces thinking in terms of negation because it is essentially arbitrary. The question of being and non-being ("why is there something rather than nothing?") is an example of this sort of thinking because it makes an arbitrary distinction between different kinds of beings and then defines everything in relation to Being, which must be some sort of Platonic form of the Same. Why should Being be the One or the being-in-the-world of Dasein? All of major philosophy from the point of view of minor philosophy seems to be little more than Nietzsche's "philosophical laborers" arguing with each other over why theirs is the most correct definition of Being, or the Good, or the Beautiful, whatever big important concepts that ultimately can be traced back to the Greeks. Rarely does anyone seem to ask whether or not it's even worth it to take part in this long discourse and what the motivations behind it are in the first place. Again invoking Nietzsche, we could better understand these philosophers by starting by first asking what their values are that lead them to make the assertions they do rather than asking whether or not their ideas are "true" or not.

Deleuze's Bergson is a hacker's philosopher. The whole game of orthodox philosophy is a losing game for him where the only winning move is to not play at all. Philosophy should instead be clever, precise, well-engineered, a kind of calculus for questions of the most general sort. This will especially come into play later as Deleuze makes reference to Riemannian multiplicity and is important for a general understnding of Deleuze's philosophy where he talks about difference in terms of mathematical differentials rather than semiotic Otherness. All of this however must also be for the sake of producing new concepts rather than engaging in the miserable laborious toil of major philosophy and its metaphysical superstructures, much like the clever hacker solves a problem elegantly because ultimately she is too lazy, unmotivated, and without any respect for authority to write a Big Important Program that looks impressive to a manager. A hacker and a Deleuzian both have no patience for monotonous toil or the managerial mindset.

As laid out at the start, the Bergsonian method is in fact a method for asking the right sorts of questions and in Deleuze's analysis there are three steps to do this. Like a clever hacker, the first step is to decide what sorts of problems are worth solving and then figure out how to state them properly. Deleuze often talks in terms of how a problem is "posited" because it should be thought of in terms of posit-ivity, of producing some new concept, which is an important distinction for understanding why this requires resisting the all-too-human tendency to think in terms of degree or negation. The logic of negation is an illusion that the image or appearance of something produces; it doesn't tell us anything new about the world but rather is subordinated to some preexisting concept and then simply restates it in terms that appear different. Even people like philosophers who are supposedly engaged in the highly technical task of thinking correctly have more often than not failed at telling us anything new about the world.

As we remember from Hume, Kant, and Heidegger, we humans are very deeply engaged with the phenomenal world around us. So much so in fact that in a Bergsonian analysis we find that we have a tendency to create false problems that arise from thinking in terms of difference in degree or intensity, because this is what it's like to be a Dasein. We are always perceiving the world in such a way that different phenomena are being focused on while others are excluded and kept in a loop until we focus on them. For Deleuze's Bergson, there is no clear difference in kind between the phenomenal world and the mind if we're thinking of it in very rigorous and technical terms, but those aren't how we actually experience the real. In pure perception, we are at once put into matter when we perceive it, and on the other hand in pure recollection we are put at once into the mind. For Deleuze's Bergson, these are the two forms that representation (Vorstellung) takes, and they are always ambiguously mixed with each other in our actual experiences of them. We never access pure recollection or pure perception where we are absolutely put at once into purely mind or purely matter, and so we are always lead to believe that what we perceive is also the pure concept we have of it, and this inevitably leads to all sorts of confusions that lead to us creating false problems and not being able to think properly.

We are now left with an armed reactionary uprising to Kant's Copernican Revolution: Your brain, in fact, tricks you into believing that the things it perceives are really what you think they are. We Dasein are in fact not so easily able to be-in-the-world, nor are we easily able to form concepts of it; we are always biased towards focusing on different things and comparing them to other things we have memories of because we've arbitrarily chosen a memory of something to be the Platonic form of it.² In order to use the Bergsonian method of intuition, we have to go beyond the "state" of experience and towards its "conditions" – or, in the terms of C&S, look past the molar formations towards the molecular processes that produce them. Having this context is essential to understanding why it really is, in the most abstract and technical of philosophical terms, that Deleuze and Guattari reject economies of lack in favor of affirmative, vitalistic flows and productions of desire. Deleuze via Bergson opens Bergsonism with a meta-theoretical question, how do we ask the right sorts of questions, and then demonstrates his own concept of properly posited questions that produce problems by showing that false problems arise from the conditions of experience and that this is itself a problem because we are biased to constantly create false problems. Though Deleuze's writing is much more formal during his academic period compared to his later collaborations with Guattari, he already anticipates the CCRU and Nyx Land in establishing that the task of thought requires us to go beyond the all-too-human state of affairs we're condemned to. Ultimately, the goal of minor philosophy is "To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman"³ or to the Outside as Nick Land called it. We create useful assemblages of concepts, not totalizing systems, so that we may rise above the confused ignorance of the merely-human and become something better than human – an Übermensch perhaps.

In order to understand how we use the Bergsonian method to get to the conditions of perception, the "articulations of the real",⁴ we need to understand how Deleuze utilizes technical Bergsonian terminology like "contraction/relaxtion". In the original French, the term is détente, which Bergson uses in a physics sense rather than the sense of relaxation-détente that English borrowed from French to mean a relaxing of (usually political) tensions. It should instead be thought of as a compressed spring, or once again invoking C&S we could instead think of it as a very dense rock: In a contracted state, something has a high amount of potential energy that isn't being expressed, many different lines of flight that are waiting to be realized, while in a relaxed state it is in a low state of intensity and high degree of expressivity. When something is relaxed, we see the many potential lines of flight of a molecular process somewhere at the root of them, and our task is to go down those lines to find their most contracted and intensified state where the "decisive turn"⁵ happens that makes them articulations of the real. Crucially, the "movements" of intuition work by these two divergent lines that also converge as they become increasingly contracted. There aren't merely two lines that appear to be different or unrelated to each other; any appearance of difference is merely a shadow of their differential. The differential is the intense convergence that produces the extensive diverging lines.

Deleuze notes that contraction-relaxation is one of many Bergsonian dualisms, and we have already seen another (perception-recollection) that in fact demonstrates how we make use of the method for determining what things differ in kind and are cut-outs of the real. The dualism (or syzygy) of perception and recollection is created from a point of maximum contraction that creates two divergent and increasingly relaxed lines. Phenomenal experience is a composite, and the elements that differ in kind are those processes or conditions that produce the two lines within which all sorts of different experiences of the world are produced. Crucially, these lines are not all possible experience in the Kantian sense but rather are real experience, the sorts of biased and subjective experiences of the world we tend to form, and an important distinction from Kantian philosophy that is hopefully becoming clear is that the Bergsonian method requires us to think in relation to time.

We are accustomed not just in our everyday experiences but also in philosophy to thinking of things in terms of spatiality. Metaphysics, in the technical philosophical sense, is something that Deleuze as a philosopher's philosopher is very concerned with, but going all the way back to Aristotle the entire field of metaphysics has been founded on thinking in terms of spatiality by focusing on dividing up the given. As popular as the idea is of trying to live in the present moment, we tend to think that the present moment is also eternal, that all the molar formations that make up the given, whatever mere appearances of things there are right now, are also the things in themselves. If we have no knowledge of biology for instance, we might see a raven and a crow and because they look very similar group them into the same category of birds, or we might see a male and female black widow spider and group them into separate categories because they look very different. In either case, we are engaged in an ultimately arbitrary act of dividing up the real based on the image of it rather than the processes that produce it, and if we are committed to thinking in very precise terms we have to recognize that thinking in terms of spatiality, of extension, is always itself thinking in terms of negation. We divide up the world according to whatever concepts we're already biased towards comparing them to, decide on divisions of things because they look right for our purposes even though any division of things can strictly speaking be infinitely divided. Zeno's most famous paradox of movement ultimately arises from this sort of thinking, and no doubt the Greeks' vested interest in making geometry an idealized model and method of thought has only exacerbated this if it is really a bias in human perception and cognition.

Flipping this tradition in philosophy and in our own perceptual biases on its head by thinking in terms of time is the third and fundamental rule of the Bergsonian method of intuition. A Bergsonian thinks not in terms of a division of the given but rather in terms of what states a particular thing has across a duration, another technical Bergsonian term that denotes specifically a psychological experience of change, transition, or becoming that endures. By thinking in terms of duration, with the intention of seeing how it is that one thing becomes another, we're able to pull back the many different masks of mere appearances that molecular processes wear. While Deleuze via Bergson presents all of this as a very abstract philosophical exercise, it's important to understand how this informs his later collaborations with Guattari and what practical upshot it has for radicals. A wealth of theory exists attempting to explain what fascism is and how it works, with no single accepted answer to this question, yet fascism is also paradoxically something that you know when you see it (much like the famous statement about pornography). On the other hand, fascism's passive aggressive twin liberalism has a relatively accepted definition even within radical circles yet is very effective at concealing itself. The disciplinary fascist societies wield a form of power that is so ancient and so pervasive in the miserable merely-human condition that we have all experienced it at some point, but the liberal societies of control are a much newer evolution of power. Control came into existence in roughly the past 50 years alongside the advent of modern, highly complex, globalized and networked civilizations with mass media propaganda apparatuses distributed all throughout it, like the ubiquitous cameras in 1984. But what George Orwell, famous anticommunist snitch and colonialist, got wrong is that the televisions don't need cameras in them and don't need to be constantly surveiling the proles to keep them under control.

If the left or any other grouping of radicals is ever going to become a relevant political force again, it should give its due to understanding Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy in order to understand how power has evolved since the 19th and early/mid 20th centuries. Contrary to the anti-intellectual Analytic/positivist propaganda that has eventually trickled down to many so-called radicals, Deleuze even at his most academic is far from being a detached ivory tower academic.⁶ His ideas are directly useful to going beyond a simple and linear understanding of history that we've been cursed with thanks to Hegel and create a sharper analysis of the tools that the enemy uses against us. The time I've personally spent witnessing the rebirth under Trump and Biden of a broad left with some amount of mainstream pull and engagement outside of its own incestuous discourses has only further convinced me of the need for a proper revival of Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy informed by its potential practical applications. D&G should not be reduced to merely whatever practical value they have, but as with the hacker analogy, the best way to see if our concepts are useful is by doing things with them.⁷ Time and time again I've seen self-described leftists be captured by the societies of control because there aren't any traditions of resistance that have a concept of control in the Deleuzian and cybernetic sense. This is why it keeps working and why it seems like there is no alternative, because no one who cares to abolish the current state of things really understands what monsters capitalism has created.

The system doesn't merely surveil and dispatch the cops whenever it detects any deviant desires; it also produces more desires that are intelligible within its codes and continually deforms itself to capture and recuperate desires that it couldn't have accounted for. It doesn't need to see everything if it creates such a sufficiently well-stocked marketplace of desires that the subjects of the societies of control believe they really do have the freedom to do or be whatever they want. Present enough choices so that the marketplace is mistaken for a neutral plane of immanence, and if any desire doesn't have a product that approximates it, start stocking new products to capture a new market. Under liberalism, the most oppressed and marginalized are always consequently at the mercy of a micropolitics that is similar to (but not equivalent to!) settler-colonialism: their experiences and cultures are always being simultaneously erased and expropriated but also assimilated into the majority or core which replaces them with a simulacra-commodity that exists in a state of "difference without opposition". This is because the downside of a system that has wholly surrendered itself to the logic of the market is that if it isn't constantly expanding into new markets it burns itself out. Much like Bitcoin, it trades decentralization for a high computational cost; every node is always having to perform computations using the codes of the present state of things.

Having a pantheon of eternal forms or values – God, the State, whiteness, maleness, straightness, and various other spooks – to discipline in relation to has historically shown to not be a very effective form of power. When a system is in a state of starvation or existential danger it becomes rigid, but to maintain equilibrium its default state needs its own codes that can adapt to changes in the environment and history. Becoming-human, and consequently becoming-man, becoming-white, is the code that liberalism uses to keep itself stable: everything that is Other can always become Same, and so the societies of control can change the mere appearances of things. But since it is their codes, their definition of "human", their definition of who is worthy of rights and who isn't, this all happens under coercion. Get with the program or the invisible hand of the marketplace of identity becomes the iron fist of fascism. The old settler-colonialist lede, "kill the Indian, save the man" most concisely illustrates what is fundamentally the logic of liberalism.

If the idea of thinking in terms of time/duration still seems imprecisely defined, in the next chapter we'll see in more detail how the Bergsonian concept of duration actually works.